Why a Customer Journey Map Matters

If you’re looking for a way to better understand consumers so you can deliver more personalized experiences and ultimately improve sales, it may be time to create a customer journey map. This tactic has become standard in numerous industries, from design and user experience (UX) to marketing. If you’re not familiar with the concept of the customer journey maps, you’re not alone. In fact, eMarketer reported that 55 percent of survey respondents said they don’t have a great understanding of the customer journey overall. If this sounds like you, take a look at what customer journey mapping is and how it could benefit your business.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

The point of customer journey mapping is to take you through the typical customer’s journey from start to finish. Basically, it’s a visual way to help you understand what a consumer might do and think before, during, and after the process of buying a product or service from you. This tool requires you to first create a few different buyer personas based on research of your target audience.

Then, each buyer persona gets its own customer journey map that lists all the touchpoints, or areas where your customer will come in contact with your company. This might include your website, social media posts, TV commercials, online reviews, word of mouth, and more. Once you have a map for each buyer persona, you’ll have a visual representation of the journey your customers will go through at each stage in the buying process. To find out why this is important for your marketing efforts, check out the benefits below.

Benefit #1: Understand Your Target Audience’s Emotions

If you want to connect with your customers, you need to first understand how they’re feeling as they move throughout the customer journey. Mapping this process will help you see how easily customers can move from touchpoint to touchpoint, such as going from viewing your Facebook page to browsing your website or calling customer service. This way, you’ll get a chance to determine if the customer journey is in an order that makes sense and makes it easy for customers to buy your products or services with as much satisfaction—and as little frustration!—as possible.

Benefit #2: Improve Sales and Decrease Costs

One big way customer journey mapping can benefit you is by cutting costs and improving profits in your company. In particular, one study found that brands that use customer journey maps enjoy 21 percent year over year growth, and the brands that don’t use these maps observe a -2.2 percent decline in growth. This study also found that the sales cycle of the brands that use journey maps is 18 times faster than usual, and their marketing ROI is 54 percent better than normal. Clearly, it pays to use customer journey maps!

Benefit #3: Figure Out What to Improve

No matter how great your business may be, there’s always room for improvement. You just might not be sure how you can improve, but customer journey mapping can pinpoint the areas that could be better. For example, you might realize one communication channel—such as your customer service line—is understaffed, causing customers long waits as they try to get more information before buying. Or maybe one of your social pages doesn’t feature a link to your website, and your website isn’t optimized for smartphones like it should be. You need to fix all these details if you want to improve customer satisfaction and sales, but you can’t fix the issues you don’t even know about. A customer journey map will tell you what the problems are so you can improve on them right away.

Benefit #4: Measure Your Success

Another benefit of customer journey maps is that they can make it easier to measure success and growth in your business. In fact, you can track metrics at every stage of the journey. For example, at the awareness stage, you might track website visits, social media engagement, and subscriptions. At the education stage, you might want to track the number of customer service inquiries you get and the amount of follow-up emails you send. According to Forrester, you just need to determine which metrics you want to track and then define a way to calculate them in order to use a customer journey map to measure important trends.

Benefit #5: Better Customer Satisfaction

Finally, you will likely notice a marked increase in customer satisfaction when you use customer journey maps, since you’ll have improved the buying journey, fixing any issues you see along the way. In fact, one study found that brands that use customer journey maps saw a 24 percent increase in positive comments about them on social media. So if you want a way to improve the satisfaction of consumers who buy from you, making a customer journey map is a good idea.

Eric Vidal, an industry expert with over 25 years of marketing and technology experience is passionate about providing insight and education on the latest martech trends and techniques. Eric speaks and writes for various publications like The Marketing Scope and Future Of Work to name a couple. Eric has been a marketing leader for companies of all sizes. He has extensive experience working to achieve measurable business results for organizations like IBM, Cisco, WebEx, Canon USA, West Corp., Dynamic Signal, SAP and more. Connect with Eric on LinkedIn.

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